Tristana (7 page)

As regards biographical details, Horacio was more forthcoming than Don Lope’s slave. She would like to have been equally open and sincere, but felt gagged by her fear of certain dark areas in her past. He, on the other hand, burned to tell her about his life, the unhappiest, saddest youth imaginable; now that he was happy, however, he enjoyed rummaging around in the sad depths of his martyrdom. When he lost both his parents, he was taken in by his paternal grandfather, beneath whose tyranny he suffered and groaned from adolescence through to manhood. Youth? He barely knew the meaning of the word. He was ignorant of the innocent pleasures, childish pranks, and frivolous restlessness with which a boy rehearses the actions of the man. There was no wild beast to compare with this grandfather, no prison more horrible than the dirty, stinking hardware store in which Horacio was kept shut up for some fifteen years, with his grandfather obdurately opposing his grandson’s innate love of painting and imposing on him instead the hateful shackles of calculus, and filling his mind up, like stoppers to keep his ideas in, with a thousand and one unpleasant chores involving accounts, invoices, and other such devilry; his grandfather had been the equal of the cruelest tyrants of antiquity or of the modern Turkish empire, and was the terror of the whole family. He sent his wife to an early grave and his male children hated him so much that they all emigrated. Two of his daughters allowed themselves to be carried off and the others made bad marriages in order to escape their father’s house.

This tiger took poor Horacio in at the age of thirteen and, as a preventative measure, tethered him by the ankles to the legs of the desk so that he wouldn’t be able to stray into the shop or abandon the tedious tasks he was obliged to perform. And if he was found idly drawing pictures with his pen, blows would rain down on him. The tiger wanted, at all costs, to instill in his grandson a love of commerce, because all that stuff and nonsense about art was, in his opinion, nothing but a very stupid way to die of hunger. Horacio’s companion in these travails and sufferings was his grandfather’s assistant, old and bald as a coot, thin and sallow-complexioned, who, in secret, for fear of riling his master—whom he served as faithfully as a dog—offered the lad his affectionate protection, covering up for any shortcomings and seeking pretexts to take him with him on errands, so that the boy could at least stretch his legs and enjoy a little diversion. The boy was docile and had few defenses against his grandfather’s despotism. He preferred to suffer rather than risk angering his tyrant, whose ire was aroused by the slightest thing. Horacio submitted, and soon no longer needed to be tied to the desk and could move with a certain freedom around that foul, stinking den, so dark that the gaslight had to be lit at four o’clock in the afternoon. He gradually adapted to that hideous mold, renouncing childhood, becoming old at fifteen, and unconsciously imitating the long-suffering attitude and the mechanical gestures of Hermógenes, the bald, yellow-skinned assistant, who, having no personality, likewise had no age, and was neither young nor old.

Even though that horrible life shriveled both body and soul, as if they were grapes laid out in the sun, Horacio nevertheless managed to keep alive his inner fire, his artistic passion, and when his grandfather allowed him a few hours of freedom on a Sunday and treated him like a human being, giving him one
real
to spend as he pleased, what did the boy do? He found paper and pencils and drew whatever he saw. It was a terrible torment to him that, although the shop was full of tubes of paint, brushes, palettes, and all the other materials required for the art he so loved, he wasn’t allowed to use them. He was always hoping for better times, watching the monotonous days go by, each day the same as the next, like the identical grains of sand in an hourglass. What sustained him was his faith in his destiny, which allowed him to withstand that mean, wretched existence.

His cruel grandfather was as tightfisted as the miserly schoolteacher Cabra in Quevedo’s
The Swindler
, and he gave his grandson and Hermógenes just enough food to keep them from starving, with no culinary refinements, as these, in his view, merely clogged up the digestive system. He wouldn’t let Horacio play with other boys, because company, even if not entirely bad, served only to corrupt: boys nowadays were as riddled with vices as men. And as for women . . . that particular aspect of life was the one that most worried the tyrant, and if he had ever discovered that his grandson had developed a soft spot for some girl, he would have beaten him to within an inch of his life. In short, he refused to allow the boy a will of his own, because other people’s wills were as much of an obstacle to him as were his own physical aches and pains, and seeing a flicker of self-will in another person provoked in him something like a toothache. He wanted Horacio to embrace the same profession as him, to acquire a taste for “merchandise,” for scrupulous accounting, commercial rectitude, and the actual running of the shop; he wanted to make a man of him, a wealthy man; he would arrange a suitable marriage for him, that is, provide a mother for the children he was sure to have, build a modest, orderly house for him, and continue to rule over his existence into old age and over the lives of his heirs and successors too. In order to achieve this aim, which Don Felipe Díaz deemed to be as noble a struggle as the struggle to save his soul, the most important thing was to cure Horacio of his foolish, childish desire to represent objects by applying paint to a piece of wood or canvas. What nonsense! Wanting to reproduce Nature, when Nature was right there in front of his eyes! What was the point of that? What is a painting? A lie, like the theater, a dumb show, and however skillfully painted a sky might be, it could never compare with the real thing. According to him, all artists were fools, madmen, falsifiers, whose sole utility was the money they spent in shops buying the tools of their trade. They were, moreover, vile usurpers of the divine gifts, and were insulting God by trying to imitate him, creating the ghosts or shadows of things that only divine action could and should create; indeed, the hottest spot in hell would be reserved for them for committing such a crime. Don Felipe despised actors and poets for the same reasons, just as he prided himself on never having read a line of poetry or seen a play; he also made much of the fact that he had never traveled, be it by train, carriage, or coach, and had never absented himself from his shop except to attend mass or deal with some matter of extreme urgency.

Thus, his one concern was to remint his grandson in his own unyielding image, and when the boy grew up and became a man, the grandfather’s desire to stamp on him his own habits and antiquated obsessions only increased. Because, it must be said, he loved him, yes, why deny it? He had grown fond of him, in the outlandish way that typified all his affections and behavior. Meanwhile, apart from Horacio’s still intense vocation for painting, his will had grown flabby with lack of use. Latterly, though, behind his grandfather’s back, in a shabby room at the top of the house, which his grandfather agreed that he could use, Horacio carried on with his painting; and there is some suggestion that Don Felipe Díaz knew about this but turned a blind eye to it. This was the first time in his life that he had ever shown any weakness, and it was, perhaps, the precursor to far graver events. Some cataclysm was bound to follow, and so it was: One morning, Don Felipe was in his office going over some English invoices for potassium chlorate and zinc sulfate, when his head dropped forward onto the paper and he died without uttering so much as a sigh. He had turned ninety the day before.

HORACIO
told all this to his young lady, along with other things that will emerge later on, and she listened with delight, confirmed in her belief that the man heaven had sent her was unique among mortals, and that his life was the strangest and most anomalous of young lives; it almost resembled the life of a saint worthy of inclusion in the list of martyrs.

“That happened,” Horacio continued, “when I was twenty-eight, when I had the habits of both an old man and a child, for on the one hand, the terrible discipline imposed on me by my grandfather had preserved in me an innocence and ignorance of the world inappropriate to my age, and on the other, I possessed virtues more appropriate to the very ancient; I felt a kind of weariness about things I had scarcely even encountered; I was filled by a weariness and tedium that made others see me as perennially stiff and numb. Anyway, my grandfather left a very large fortune, amassed penny by penny in that vile, malodorous shop. I got a fifth part of it; they gave me a lovely house in Villajoyosa, two other smaller country houses, and a corresponding share in the hardware store, which continues to trade under the name of Nephews of Felipe Díaz. On finding myself suddenly free, it took me a while to recover from the stupor into which my independence had thrown me; I felt so timid that when I tried to take a few steps into the world, I stumbled, yes, I stumbled, like someone who cannot walk because he hasn’t used his legs in a long time.

“When that wretched brake on my life was finally released, my artistic vocation saved me and made me a man. I didn’t hang around to haggle over the execution of the will, I escaped and rushed straight to Italy, my hope, my dream. I had begun to believe Italy didn’t really exist, that such beauty was a lie, a mirage. I arrived and the inevitable happened. I was like a seminarian with no vocation who is unleashed upon the world after fifteen years of enforced virtue. You’ll understand, I’m sure, how that sudden contact with life awoke in me a wild desire to make up for what I had missed, to live in a matter of months the years that time owed me, having cruelly stolen them from me with the connivance of that fanatical old man. You don’t understand? Well, in Venice, I gave myself over to a life of dissipation, going far beyond my own natural instincts, because the old man-child I had become was not nearly as dissolute as he was trying to appear to be, in order to get his own back, to avenge himself on his dull, foolish past self. I came to believe that I was not a real man unless I took licentiousness to extremes, and I amused myself by looking at my reflection in that mirror, a much-begrimed mirror if you like, but one in which I seemed far more elegant than I ever had in my grandfather’s back room. Needless to say, I soon grew bored. In Florence and Rome, art cured me of those diabolical desires and, having passed the test, I was no longer tormented by the idea of ‘becoming a real man’ and began to devote myself to my studies; I launched enthusiastically into drawing from nature; however, the more I learned, the more I became aware of the deficiencies in my artistic education. As regards color, I was fine. I had a natural talent for that, but when it came to drawing, I seemed to grow clumsier with each passing day. How I suffered! How many sleepless nights I spent, how I labored day and night, trying to achieve the right line, struggling with it and giving up, only to return at once to that terrifying battle with renewed energy and fury!

“It
was
infuriating, but how could it be otherwise? Since I hadn’t practiced drawing as a child, I had the devil’s own job to handle shapes fluently. In my days of slavery, writing endless numbers in Don Felipe’s office, I used to amuse myself by giving them human form. I would give the sevens a rather bullying air, as if I were drawing a brief sketch of a man; I made my eights look like buxom women and so on . . . and my threes had my grandfather’s profile, like the side view of a tortoise. Such childish pursuits were not enough though. They didn’t train me to study the lines of objects and reproduce them. I worked, I sweated, I cursed . . . and, in the end, I actually did begin to improve. I spent a year in Rome, devoting myself body and soul to formal study, and although I still went out on the occasional drunken spree, as I had in Venice, they were far less boisterous affairs, and I was no longer the overgrown child who, having arrived late at life’s party, belatedly gobbles down the dishes already served in order to catch up with those who began eating at the appointed hour.

“I returned to Alicante, where my uncles and aunts had meanwhile divided up my grandfather’s legacy, assigning me whatever part they wished, and I never objected or bargained, but said my final farewell to the hardware shop—now transformed and modernized—and came to Madrid, where I have an aunt whom I really don’t deserve, an absolute angel, a widow with no children of her own, but who loves and cares for me and spoils me as if I were her own son. She too was a victim of the family tyrant. He used to give her a peseta a day and tell her, in all his letters, that she must save . . . As soon as I arrived in Madrid, I dedicated myself entirely to my work. I’m ambitious, I want applause and glory and renown. It saddens me to be a mere zero, worth nothing more than any of the other grains of sand that form the multitude. And until someone convinces me otherwise, I will believe that I contain a fragment, however tiny, of the divine essence that God scattered willy-nilly over the heap.

“I’ll tell you something else. Months before I met you, I was plunged into the most dreadful melancholy here in Madrid. There I was with thirty wasted years behind me, and although I knew a little of life and the joys of youth, and could savor, too, certain aesthetic pleasures, I had not known love, had never experienced that sense of fusing my life with that of another person. I began studying abstruse philosophies and, in the solitude of my studio, I struggled with the human form. I had a feeling that love existed only in the desire to obtain it. I fell again into the bitter depressions I had suffered as an adolescent; in my dreams I saw silhouettes, temptingly vague beckoning shapes, whispering lips. I understood then the most subtle of ideas; the most obscure of psychologies seemed to me as clear as the four rules of arithmetic. Then I saw you; you came to meet me. I asked if you were the one and heaven knows what other nonsense. I was so bewildered that you must have thought me utterly ridiculous. However, God decided that you would prove capable of seeing the serious man behind the fool. Our romanticism, our exaltation, struck neither of us as absurd. We came to each other full of hunger, the noble, pure, spiritual hunger that moves the world, which is the reason we exist and will be for the thousands of generations who come after us. I knew you were mine and you declared that I was yours. That is what life is for; what does anything else matter?”